The Call of Collecting

By Richard C. Morais

Are there any truths universal to all collectors, no matter what they collect?

I’ve long pondered that issue, which is why Penta recently convened a panel of world-class collectors for a night of white wine and gab at the Bonhams auction house on Madison Avenue in New York. Our goal: have three wildly different collectors—in watches, wine, and fine-art photography—tell their personal stories about how they built their collections and, in the process, determine if there were any threads that stitched through all their stories.

There were several, but one theme in particular stuck with me. It is, of course, well known that hot passion is at the core of all great collections and collectors. The revelation was how the seeds of that passion are sewn in the first half of the collector’s life.

Paul Boutros, a young engineer working in the aerospace industry, is a revered American collector of rare and vintage Swiss watches. At the age of 10, Paul got his coin-collecting father to look at a $23,000 IWC moon-phase pocket watch in the window at Wempe Jewelers on Fifth Avenue in New York.

So began their joint interest, a watch collection that became a vital tool of communication between father and son. Paul said he constantly fought with his Egyptian father—who was both culturally different from and much older than most American fathers—but that their time collecting watches together was always an oasis of peace and joy and excitement.

Life pulled Paul in other directions, until his father died just as Paul finished graduate school. Opening his father’s safe-deposit box, he found the watch collection they had built together.

“I was overwhelmed and overcome by emotion. I said, ‘This is his spirit, this is us, these are my happiest memories.’ Since his death in 2002, I’ve been head over heels into watches.”

George Sape, the managing director emeritus of the law firm Epstein Becker Green, is one of the most experienced and lauded wine collectors in the U.S.—and a born raconteur. Sape has a ­cellar of 25,000 wines, and he told us how his immigrant father always insisted that the entire family sit down for a proper dinner, with white tablecloth, silverware, china, and, even for 12 year-old George, a small glass of table wine.

Then, at college, George discovered how wine was an invaluable social tool. Rather than serve Purple Passion—a grape juice and grain-alcohol mix that was de rigueur at University of Colorado fraternities at the time—George and a friend decided to serve wine at special Friday-night picnics while wearing tuxedos, giving his fraternity a significant competitive edge in the draw for women. And so, a lifelong passion for wine, imbued with the joys of bon vivant socializing with family and friends, was born.

“I suddenly realized wine was much more than something to drink,” said Sape. “Wine has an attraction that allows you to do other things, to create events, a mood, or a feeling.”

Evan Mirapaul followed a different path. A violinist with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Evan in his late-20s began to take trips with his brother. In 1989, on one of these fraternal vacations, they visited Washington, D.C., and by chance saw On the Art of ­Fixing a Shadow, a 150-year retrospective of photography at the ­National Gallery of Art.

“It was a revelation,” he said. “It started with what photo people call little brown pictures, daguerreotype and sepia, and then went into little gray pictures. But then it went into a place I couldn’t imagine, things we didn’t even know were photographs. There were David Hockney collages, Duane Michals sequences, and very large-scale things. It exploded my idea of what was ­happening in photography right now in our lives, and what a ­photograph could be.” From then on, Evan and his brother ­explored photography and collecting wherever they traveled. While his brother’s interest eventually tapered, Evan became a significant collector of photography, helping to discover the fine works of little-known Hungarian and Polish artists.

My take-away: In all cases, family and close friends played key roles planting the seeds of passion in the collector, their spectral presence somehow imbuing the art of collecting with a special emotional resonance.

About Penta

Written with Barron’s wit and often contrarian perspective, Penta provides the affluent with advice on how to navigate the world of wealth management, how to make savvy acquisitions ranging from vintage watches to second homes, and how to smartly manage family dynamics.

Richard C. Morais, Penta’s editor, was Forbes magazine’s longest serving foreign correspondent, has won multiple Business Journalist Of The Year Awards, and is the author of two novels: The Hundred-Foot Journey and Buddhaland, Brooklyn. Robert Milburn is Penta’s reporter, both online and for the quarterly magazine. He reviews everything from family office regulations to obscure jazz recordings.